Friday December 07, 2018

Yesterday, Qualcomm took the wraps off their highest end Snapdragon SOC to date. Instead of targeting smartphones, tablets and other devices like Qualcomm's usual products, the Snapdragon 8cx is aimed squarely at the Windows 10 laptop market. The company claims the Adreno 680 GPU is twice as fast as "its previous generation," while the Kryo 495 CPU cluster "supports equivalent peak performance to a competitor’s high performance 15W solution but in a fanless, thin and light design." Qualcomm also touts support for USB 3.1, PCIe 3.0, 4K HDR displays, aptX, and Category 20 LTE. Critically, the company also claims they're bridging the x86 software gap with native support for Office 365, Firefox, and "popular titles from Gameloft." Check out the platform's promo video below:

Now, if you compare the performance in a fanless, thin-and-light design (7W TDP), Snapdragon 8cx supports double the sustained performance vs. the competitor's solution but at a fraction of the power. Again, it's another instance of how we've dramatically increased performance for users without hindering their laptop's potential battery life.